Salesforce partnered with CNBC to create a long-form content series promoting its business, which aired across multiple NBC- and Salesforce-owned channels.
Objective:
The goal of the effort undertaken by Salesforce with CNBC was to position Salesforce as a premiere enterprise strategy partner in a tough business environment in which many Salesforce competitors were undertaking similar endeavors to showcase their own strategic capabilities.
Digital disruption exacerbated by the pandemic and its aftermath created a huge need for strategic insight as companies across all verticals struggled to adapt to volatile business conditions, new customer expectations, and ever-evolving "new norms."
CNBC is filled with insights and thought leadership from subject matter experts, so breaking through the clutter and establishing a unique value proposition was a key objective.
Target Audience:
The target audience was CNBC's audience of C-suite executives and executive-level business decision makers across all business verticals, including operations, finance, sales, marketing, IT, business technology, and human resources.
Age, gender, and culture were not demographic areas of consideration. The campaign's content was intended to provide risk-takers as well as the risk-averse with actionable examples and supporting rationale to make crucial decisions during a time of heightened uncertainty.
Creative Strategy:
Salesforce's strategic approach was to leverage long-form storytelling uncommon in the branded space to create a "big splash" content program that would break through the B2B content clutter, executed in the "reality" format seen in the successful CNBC series Shark Tank, The Profit, and Blue Collar Millionaires.
The Shift was a documentary-style half-hour branded content television series spotlighting seven Salesforce enterprise clients as they evolved their business practices to adapt to changing landscapes with the help of Salesforce's innovative technology.
This seven-part series positioned Salesforce as a premiere enterprise strategy partner while showcasing real-life use cases and enterprise successes supported by partnership with Salesforce.
Secondarily, the series served as a client relationship tool by providing key Salesforce customers with an opportunity for exposure to CNBC's vast audience of business decision-makers. Each 22-minute episode showcased real-world challenges and how their solutions were achieved and enabled by innovative technology from, and partnership with, Salesforce.
The paid programming series, a first-of-its-kind for CNBC, aired at 2:30 pm EST on CNBC linear for nine consecutive Saturdays, with the content-life extended and promoted on CNBC.com, Peacock, and Salesforce+ channels.
Context:
This was the first year of the campaign. This type of long-form serialized branded content, running in consecutive paid programming time slots, had never been done before on CNBC. The linear airings on CNBC were executed and promoted as a network half-hour episodic series, while historical knowledge of branded content performance across channels was leveraged to maximize viewership and engagement with an extensive digital media campaign.
Episodes were hosted on a hub on CNBC.com, edited into short clips for promotion across social media platforms, showcased via a series page and an ad innovation "spotlight" on Peacock, NBCU's video-streaming platform, and the Salesforce+ streaming platform.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Digital distribution was crucial in meeting campaign KPIs, as digital platforms provide the most direct campaign measurement. The team employed a new rich-media content ad format designed specifically for this campaign to boost views and time spent with the content. The unit saw impressive performance and generated thousands of video views with a completion rate over five times the effort's benchmark. The overall budget was over seven figures, inclusive of production.
Promotion dollars were allocated approximately as follows:
Following their TV debuts, episodes were published to CNBC.com, NBCU's Peacock streaming platform, and Salesforce+, with significant promotion on CNBC digital channels, social media, and Apple News. In addition, the CNBC Brand Studio used online promotional tactics to drive users to the content — tactics that included branded content cards and stories (ad units that serve in standard display but are designed to look like social media posts).
The frequency, volume, and period of promotion was managed in timed tranches to build series engagement across platforms as a traditional editorial series would be promoted. In addition, as audiences were exposed to first the 15-second, then the 30-second, then the minute-long spot, incremental and sequential storytelling was used to drive consumers into the full-length episode experience.
The campaign outperformed every benchmark.
The core target audience was effectively engaged at scale over secondary and general targets.
Importantly, supporting the case for a second season, over 90 percent of the core target audience wanted to "see more content like this" from the Salesforce+/CNBC partnership.
The Shift campaign demonstrated a positive impact on Salesforce+'s brand perceptions and sparked a likelihood to watch more content on Salesforce+. Partnering with CNBC for The Shift resonated very strongly with respondents, signalizing the partnership as a natural fit.
